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Romantic Circles Blog

The International Association of Byron Societies (IABS) has unveiled a new Web site, available at http://www.internationalassociationofbyronsocieties.org/. Along with a fresh design, the site contains information and links about Lord Byron, the IABS' member organizations, conference announcements, and news.

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On the occasion of the bicentenary of the Battle of Waterloo, the Centre for Reception Studies (http://www.receptionstudies.be) of the KU Leuven (University of Leuven) organizes an international conference on "The Transnational Reception of Waterloo in the 19th Century" on 18 and 19 June 2015 (200 years to the day of the Battle).

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The Romantic Eye, 1760–1860 and Beyond
April 17, 2015-April 18, 2015
Call For Papers
Yale University

This symposium examines Romanticism as a shape-shifting cultural phenomenon
that resists easy categorization. Focusing on the period from 1760 to 1860,
the symposium embraces the amorphousness that has been ascribed to
Romanticism historically by eschewing any limiting definition of it, seeking
instead to explore the broad range of art and visual culture characterized as
“Romantic” during this hundred-year span. We are interested in what the
Romantic “eye” pursued and perceived, and how it set itself the task of
recording those perceptions. In addition to interrogations of the
relationship between the visual arts and Romanticism, we welcome papers on
writers, composers, scientists, and philosophers whose projects engaged the
visual. Papers also are sought for a special panel that will address the
legacies of Romanticism in contemporary art.

This symposium coincides with a major collaborative exhibition organized by
the Yale Center for British Art and the Yale University Art Gallery, The
Critique of Reason: Romantic Art, 1760–1860, which opens March 6, 2015. The
exhibition comprises more than three hundred paintings, sculptures, medals,
watercolors, drawings, prints, and photographs by such iconic artists as
William Blake, John Constable, Honoré Daumier, David d’Angers, Eugène
Delacroix, Henry Fuseli, Théodore Géricault, Francisco de Goya, John
Martin, and J. M. W. Turner. Talks that respond explicitly to works in the
collections of the Yale Center for British Art or the Yale University Art
Gallery are particularly encouraged, as are cross-disciplinary and
comparative studies.

We are seeking presentations of thirty minutes in length. Graduate students
and early career scholars are particularly encouraged to apply. Travel and
accommodation costs will be covered by the organizers. Please e-mail
abstracts of no more than three hundred words and a short CV or bio (no more
than two pages) by February 2, 2015, to romanticism2015@gmail.com.

The symposium is cosponsored by the Department of the History of Art at Yale
University, the Yale Center for British Art, the Yale University Art Gallery,
and the Yale Student Colloquia Fund.

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To mark the publication of Volume II of the Letters of William Godwin, a number of scholars convened for a colloquium at Wolfson College, Oxford, on 18 November 2014.

The four talks, by Pamela Clemit, Mark Philp, Jenny McAuley, and Jon Mee, have been released as a podcast. They highlight the breadth and diversity of Godwin’s life and correspondence between 1798 and 1805.

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23rd Annual Meeting of the British Women Writers Conference

June 25th-27th, 2015

Hosted by The Graduate Center of the City University of New York
at The Heyman Center, Columbia University

Relations

The British Women Writers Conference will engage the theme of “Relations” for its 23rd annual meeting to be held in New York City. The inspiration for this theme comes from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, who taught at the Graduate Center from 1998-2009, and whose investment in relations continues to inspire new ways of looking at the richness and variance of (dis)connection. One of her last courses, “Reading Relations,” explored literary constructions and alternative understandings of relationality (the syllabus for the course can be seen at http://evekosofskysedgwick.net/teaching/reading-relations.html). Sedgwick’s interdisciplinary approach informs our conference’s investments. In this spirit, we invite papers—as well as panel proposals—that focus on possible interpretations of and approaches to relationality across a broad spectrum of topics, methods, and disciplines. We would welcome investigations of interaction, exchange, correlation, or conjunction. Alternately, treatments might focus on relationality as a political, historical, global, social, personal, critical or textual phenomenon.

For paper proposals, please send a 300-word abstract and a short bio (in a single attachment) to bwwc2015@gmail.com by January 5th, 2015. For full panel proposals, please compile all proposals, along with a brief rationale for the panel, into a single document. Papers and panels must address the theme and its application to British women’s writing of the long 18th- or 19th-centuries.

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The Keats Foundation announces its second bicentenary conference, to be held from the afternoon of Friday 1 until the evening of Sunday 3 May 2015 at Guy’s Hospital London. The conference marks the 200th anniversary of John Keats enrolling to study medicine at Guy’s Hospital in 1815.

The conference will be held on the 29th floor of Guy’s Hospital Tower Building - with extensive views of the City of London.

We will visit the surroundings of Guy’s Hospital, including the celebrated John Keats statue in the quadrangle. One of our receptions will be held in the Old Operating Theatre at Guy’s, giving participants an opportunity to gather around the operating table with glasses of wine. Our second reception and buffet-banquet will be held in private, wood-panelled rooms at the historic seventeenth-century George Inn – London’s only surviving galleried inn.

Call for Papers
Proposals for 20-minute papers are invited, under the broad heading of ‘John Keats: Poet-Physician / Physician-Poet’. We particularly welcome papers on the relation of Keats’s poetry, letters, life and times to any of the following:

Medicine / poetry and medicine

Romantic-era hospitals

Medical training

Surgery / dissection / anatomy

Prescriptions and the pharmacopoeia

Infection / disease

Tuberculosis / consumption

Healing

Women’s health

Medical texts

Wounds

Nerves

Mercury

Hypochondria

Melancholia

Hallucination and drugs

This list offers some starting points for presentations and is not intended to limit possible topics. For obvious reasons, however, all papers should have a Keatsian focus.

Please send 200-word proposals as an email attached document to the conference administrator, Hrileena Ghosh hg27@st-andrews.ac.uk by 15 January 2015. Please ensure that your proposal is headed with your paper title, your name, institutional affiliation, and an e-mail contact address. Acceptances will be issued by 31 January at the latest; please let us know if you have a deadline for travel or funding.

Please note: the conference registration fee will be confirmed when Registration opens in January 2015, and is likely to be in the region of £150 (full rate)/£90 (postgraduates and unwaged), inclusive of the two receptions; £100/£50 conference attendance only. Lunches, coffees, teas, biscuits, cakes and other refreshments are all included, as are conference stationary and electronic resources. When submitting your paper proposal, please would you indicate whether you would like to attend the receptions. Every effort has been made to keep registration fees to a minimum. Travel and accommodation arrangements are left to delegates’ discretion.

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Romantic Circles is delighted to announce the publication of a new volume in its Praxis series: Visuality's Romantic Genealogies, edited by Theresa M. Kelley and Jill H. Casid.

The volume is dedicated to both excavating the Romantic genealogies of visuality and charting directions for the ways in which the study of Romantic visual culture may redraw the geographic, temporal, and disciplinary bounds of Romanticism, bringing diverse, and in some instances new, objects and their ethical, political, and aesthetic stakes into view. The essays investigate three broad inquiries: 1) technologies of vision and objectivity’s slippages; 2) the indigenous or transplanted fruits of visuality’s New World Genealogies and 3) the role of proto-photography, panopticism, and slavery in the spectral formation of Romantic visuality. Emphasizing the ways we interpret visuality in romantic culture, the volume invites reconsideration of media, practices, and discourses that would seem to belong to earlier and later periods—from the artifacts and modes of viewing attached to curiosity and to technologies and ways of imaging and imagining that have become aligned with photography and the digital. The volume includes an editor's introduction by Theresa M. Kelley and Jill H. Casid, with essays by Sophie Thomas, Marcus Wood, Matthew Francis Rarey, Kay Dian Kriz, and Lucy Kamiko Hawkinson Traverse.

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Romantic Circles is delighted to announce the publication of a new volume in its Praxis series: Tragedy, Translation and Theory: In Honor of the Work of Thomas J. McCall.

This issue takes its inspiration from the writings on translation, tragedy and twentieth-century literary theory in the work of the late Romanticist and comparatist Tom McCall, who died suddenly in January 2011. Three noted Romanticists and literary theorists, taking off from specific critical essays by McCall, explore the centrality of Greek tragedy as it emerges in Romantic writing (especially that of Friedrich Hölderlin), for philosophy, literature, and literary theory. Passing between the Greek and the German (notably in Hölderlin’s translations of Sophocles), and between the literary and the philosophical, these papers offer new and original insights into the complex ways in which Romantic writing was bound to the translation and interpretation of Greek writing and the unique manner in which twentienth-century literary theory emerged from the Romantic reflection on the relation between language and the emergence (and suspension) of thought. Edited and introduced by Cathy Caruth, with essays by Cathy Caruth, Ian Balfour, David S. Ferris, and three contributions from Tom McCall (1 |2 |3).

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We've just become aware of a "marathon" reading of Wordsworth's 1805 Prelude read by folks at the University of Cambridge in 2010. Complete audio of the reading is available here. Below is a sample reading from Book First:

Thanks to Catherine Ross on the NASSR listserv for sharing the link.

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The British Library's Discovering Literature: Romantics and Victorians offers a wealth of material on the British 19th century, including William Blake’s notebook, childhood writings of the Brontë sisters, the manuscript of the Preface to Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist, and an early draft of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest.

According to the site,

Discovering Literature features over 8000 pages of collection items and explores more than 20 authors through 165 newly-commissioned articles, 25 short documentary films, and 30 lesson plans. More than 60 experts have contributed interpretation, enriching the website with contemporary research. Designed to enhance the study and enjoyment of English literature, the site contains a dedicated Teachers’ Area supporting the curriculum for GCSE and A Level students.

Contextual materials of various sorts--newspapers, photographs, advertisements, and maps--accompany the materials, along with various teaching resources. The site is navigable by authors, works, themes, and "collection items," individual objects held in the library's collections.